Owen's Blog

Just found out MacGyver’s first name was Angus, huh who’d have thunk it.

Architectural concerns with the ASP.net MVC Framework – John Daniel-Trask

Ok so if there’s one thing I do want to say about this is that it wasn’t really about architecture, yet it had an arc stream code. JD is a great presenter, witty and quick and keeps the flow going well, but I’m not sure the material suited the title… a lot about TDD and dependency injection, and a more developer focused that perhaps it should have been. Was a great dissection of Kigg (which should be held as an example of what not to do), but should have been on the developer track.

Hardcore LINQ to entities – Adam Cogan

Ok Adam, you took way too long to get to point, also a few to many deviations from the point. I really don’t have any inclination to use Linq to SQL or Linq to Entities, they both seem too configuration heavy, I’ll stick to Lightspeed for my own projects.

Application lifecycle management with “Rosario” – Mat Velloso

So the new Visual Studio Team System is called Rosario, and MS are still going down the route of putting everyone into Visual Studio. I really don’t think this approach will work, there unit testing framework is far from the best. However the new test management application (can’t remember the code name) looks somewhat interesting. but I can’t really see it taking off, only time will tell. A couple of great ideas: Saving videos of tests, and snapshots of virtual machines at the point where the error occurred.

Designing Compelling User Experiences with Expression Studio 2 – Nigel Parker

Less practical advise in this one and more of a run through of a few cool sites and great user experiences that can be created with Silverlight. Silverlight has the potential to be a great technology, allowing an already experienced group of .net developers create some compelling apps. But the proof will be in the pudding.

Ok so second day of Tech Ed and my brain is awash with new ideas and techniques i can apply to my everyday work.

Last night we had a great Blogger’s dinner, where I met with a number of the people who’s posts i read on a regular basis, such as Alex Henderson, Chakkaradeep. Must say a huge thank you to Darryl Burling for organising it also thanks to Scott Hanselman who came along and spoke to us about blogging and gave us a number of tips and fielded more than a few questions.

Web Futures Panel – Scott Hanselman, Jorke Odolphi, Harry Pierson, Jonas Follesø

The first session I got to today as the earlier sessions didn’t appeal. The session seemed to focus more on where we are at the moment, and while it’s interesting I actually don’t agree with the general opinion that what’s great about the web on devices such as the iPhone is the fact that sites just work. I love what Xero and kiwibank have done in realising that the situations where I’m using these devices are such that I don’t want to be burdened by the cruft that comes with the full web application instead I want a very distilled usable subsection of the application that’s usable while on the move. I found it a bit disappointing that no one trumpeted the cleanliness and usability that’s shining through with these new breeds of mobile sites.

Advanced Cross Browser Layout with Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 – Matt Hellar

This was the most disappointing of presentations, nothing much new here, but the slides were incomplete/out of date and the beta version of IE on the presenters laptop actually didn’t work as advertised, and didn’t pick up the EmulateIE8 tag that’s supposed to be the point of beta 2.

Pumping Iron – Dynamic Languages on .net – Harry Pierson

Harry did a great job of showing off the power of dynamic languages on .net, but I’m not as much a fan of Python (I find it scans worse than ruby) but as Harry is the IronPython guy, I understand why so many of his examples were in python, having said that a few too many of his examples were, “look at what I wrote” but that’s a minor thing. the IronPython and IronRuby ports look great, and looking forward to seeing the DLR drop.